Definition
SERIAL is an identifying number unique to each household in a given sample. All person records are assigned the same serial number as the household record that they follow. (Person records also have their own unique identifiers -- see PERNUM.) The combination of SAMPLE and SERIAL provides a unique identifier for every household in the IPUMS-International database; SAMPLE, SERIAL and PERNUM uniquely identify every person in the database.
SERIAL can be used to identify dwellings in some samples. In these samples, the first 7 digits of SERIAL provide the dwelling number common to all households that were sampled from the same structure. The last three digits give the sequence of the household within the dwelling. The following is a list of samples in which dwellings can be inferred:
Chile 1970, 1992, 2002Colombia 1993, 2005Costa Rica 1984, 2000Cuba 2002Dominican Republic 1981, 2002, 2010Ecuador 1990, 2001Germany 1971Hungary 1980, 1990, 2001Jamaica 1982, 1991, 2001Malaysia 1970, 1991, 2000Mexico 1995, 1990, 2000, 2005Nigeria 2006Panama 2000Peru 1993, 2007Portugal 1981, 1991, 2001Spain 1991Uruguay 2011Venezuela 1990, 2001Vietnam 1989In all other samples, the last 3 digits are always zeroes.
SERIAL was constructed for IPUMS-International, and has no relation to the serial number in the original datasets.
The U.S. 1900 sample and 1880 10% sample have multi-household dwellings that can be identified using the last 3 digits of SERIAL.
